A friend of mine showed me a cool A chord to play On The Cover of the Rolling Stone.
barre a standard A with the first finger, then reach down to the fifth fret with the pinky and barre the E and B strings. gives a unique sound and it’s what you hear on the recording. The song is basically that A chord, E and D. There’s a piano part where you can use barre chords instead of open chords. Been playing along with the record tonight and having a blast.
anyone seen this A chord done this way before? I’m going to start listening for it on songs that I play with the recordings.
It’s just a version of what I think of as a “Country G”* (320033) moved up 2 frets and taking advantage of the open root and 5th of the chord (002255). I first came across your version of A when I was learning “Alice’s Restaurant”, though it uses finger picking, not strumming.
If you’re interested in trying it out, well, I’ve never had luck with tablature in ASCII characters, so I’ll use string/fret/left hand finger here. You start with a index finger barre across the 432 strings on the 2nd fret and get the alternating bass going with your right thumb, and toss in a {1/5/pinky}, {1/3/middle}, and then {2/5/pinky} to get the melody for the lyrics “you want at”. It’s nice in that even if your barre is sloppy and you fret the 1st string too, it doesn’t matter.
*Lennon’s “You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away” needs this G too.
Dr Hook often used several guitars. The new A chord voicing I learned is closer to the combined sound they are playing. The alternating bass note strumming is a big part of the song’s sound. I’m still working on getting that clean. Its a fun song to play with the record.
Hey, another cool chord to try. I’ve had some fun trying the country G in a few songs.
Update on the pickup fiasco - I got my PUs swapped out of my project Squier Strat. The final setup is a SH4-JB in the Bridge, Vintage Rails in the Middle and Cool Rails in the neck. All are Seymour Duncan models. All are capable of coil tapping but I did not wire for that. I figure I can always mod that later.
Since I wasn’t sure anything would sound right I’ve been putting the old strings back on the strat as I try different PUs. And of course, I broke the 1st tuning it up so I couldn’t quite test out high treble on the pickups. But what I heard was about a 500% improvement over the stock sets. It was late last night when I finished so I’m looking forward to some quality time with new PUs, new strings and less sleepiness.
Look, as far as I am concerned, all guitar is good guitar. And you seem to know your way around guitars, so more power to you. But I have to say, more than 30 seconds of the poppy-slappy stuff puts me off most of the time.
I get what you’re saying, and I also feel the same way about guys like Lenny Breau or Chet Atkins. I’ve been primarily a cowboy chord/rhythm kind of player for a lot of years and always stood in awe of the people who can pull so much music out of one instrument. I’m playing catch up on a lot of lead style playing and on music theory, which kind of puts me at a disadvantage, and the “band in a box” concept is appealing.
BTW, Benjamin Lapp does a cover of Going to California that I thought was pretty good as well.
Well, as a fellow meat-and-potatoes rhythm guy, I can relate. And I am not one to really talk: I have just moved, after 35+ years of playing, to fingerstyle. The whole intent is to have more of a “band in a box” feel, but doing it more using a Knopfler-like approach to fingerstyle vs. the drum-guitar approach.
[QUOTE=aceplace57]
anyone seen this A chord done this way before? I’m going to start listening for it on songs that I play with the recordings.
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Pete Townshend has been known to use it. I’d guess this is A5’s greatest moment…
TL;DR: I wanted stuff, I saw stuff available, I got stuff. Happiness ensued.
The surf rock band I’m in is about to release a record (if you’d like one, PM me, I’d sell one to a Doper at my cost. Breaking even is my dream.), and we’re going to have a couple of shows to promote it. But the guitarist is in California now, and is flying back here for them. He’s bringing his guitar and some pedals, but needs an amp. He usually plays through either a 5150 or a Dual Showman into an Ampeg 4x12 cab. I’ve got quite a few amps, but nothing that quite fits that bill in hugeness. Trying to rent something of that sort turned out to be kinda hard to do. I could rent combos from several places, but I can borrow lots of nice Twins for free, so that wasn’t much help.
I’d been eyeing a Trace Elliot Super Tramp* that was sitting in a local store for a couple of months, but hadn’t come up with a good reason to buy it. Due to my current needs, it was looking like a pretty good option at this point. I went and tried it, and it really was better than I had hoped it would be. In that video, those tones are all guitar straight into the amp with no effects. The Ampeg cab it was sitting on was ragged out, though. It sounded good until the very tail end of a note’s decay, then it would buzz a bit. I plugged it into the Marshall 1960A cab next to it, and that problem went away. The Marshall was the same price, and had casters, so that was a no-brainer.
Got the whole ball of wax for $450, and now I’m a 44 year old with a half stack. The cat is not impressed. Compared to anything but my bass rig, which lives at the practice space, this thing sounds huge. Two more 12’s and 60-odd more watts makes a lot of difference in apparent volume. It’s really too big for most clubs, but one of our shows is in an honest to goodness theater. This thing should fill the area in front of where the columns converge nicely. One of the aforementioned borrowed Twins will be in reserve (or if he goes nuts, he might run stereo into both). I think he’ll be pleased, either way.
The extra bonus in this tale is that the shop is a primarily a (damn good) second-hand store. He was more interested in a trade than a straight sell. I fended off the urge to trade an old, semi-beloved amp in order to get a better deal. GAS may be the only force that can compare with entropy in its win/loss ratio.
*Oddly, every demo/review I can find of this amp is in Spanish. Go figure. I have no idea why Gibson didn’t continue this line when they bought Trace-Elliot. It’s the best sounding tube pre/SS power amp that I’ve heard other than my G-K MB Fusion 500. The G-K has no reverb and is 500 watts, so it’s not the best amp for a non-bass guitar. Plus, this guitarist’s volume is why I bought the G-K in the first place. (Considers his position for a moment) Yep, master of my own demise, I am.
EtFlagon, I finally got around to watching this. Fascinating stories and well told - Eddie is willing to be the wise old master now. But yeah - he totally deserves a tippy-top reputation as an innovator and influencer and musician; no need to state that “they invented tablature to capture my technique” when it has been around since the Renaissance. :smack:
scabpicker: my, that sounds like fun in a Big and Loud sorta way. I doubt I would last any more. Nothing like feeling your arm hairs move.
I would’ve said that amp sounds amazingly good for a hybrid, but really, it just sounds amazingly good, period - and amazingly versatile, too. Since nobody designs a solid state power amp for distortion (too harsh, unless there’s an exception I’m forgetting), am I right in assuming that all those sounds are coming from the tube preamp, and therefore you’re able to get those sounds at low volume levels? 'Cause you’re right, Gibson’s nuts.
[QUOTE= WorldMan]
EtFlagon, I finally got around to watching this. Fascinating stories and well told - Eddie is willing to be the wise old master now. But yeah - he totally deserves a tippy-top reputation as an innovator and influencer and musician; no need to state that “they invented tablature to capture my technique” when it has been around since the Renaissance.
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Well, to be fair, if Eddie’s actually a 500 year old vampire, it could be true.
Really, when you add up all the guys who’re as accomplished as Eddie is on the geetar, and consider how many of them can also pen a tune like Eddie can, it’s a really short list. Somebody should tell that Renaissance man that his place in history is already secure.
But he’s pretty engaging, isn’t he? I could’ve listened to another 17 minutes.
Don’t worry. If I did mine, I’d have to start a long time ago, and there’d be lots of parts.
I envy you having 9 guitars on your wall. As a keyboard player I have only 6. A cheap 5-string electric bass, a 60’s National LP Copy, a 65 Jazzmaster, a 60’s Guild cedar-top classical, a Martin HD28, and an inexpensive hand-made archtop (and how rare is that phrase?)
I sure would like to add a small wood-body resophonic. And heck, why not a 12-string? Everyone else has one! Plus a Telecaster of some ilk. And oh yeah, a 335 or something like that.
And then, learn to play 'em. Until then, they’d sure look nice hanging on the wall.
Here’s an old pic. The bass there is my son’s, not mine. (That’s an Aria Pro II, which is nicer than my Alvarez.)
Hey - a '65 Jazzmaster and a Martin HD-28 are nothing to sniff at! Nice!
I have a super-long list of guitars I think about, but when I stray too far into niche-land, I end up not pursuing them. I have tried resonators and jazz archtops, etc. - ultimately, I keep my Guitar Toy budget focused on the fewest, nicest guitars I can have.
I have a funny habit of never selling. I did let a fairly crappy acoustic go, and a cheap violin bass that was given to me, I gave to someone who had better use for it. (Yeah, a knockoff of the Sir Paul bass, and it was a piece of crap.)
The 65 Jazzmaster has a reissue neck, and oddly, the coveted “greenguard” fingerboard doesn’t quite match the cutout in the body; something I’ve never seen on another legit Fender. But I do believe it’s legit. When I got it, my best friend saw it and said “What a crappy paint job! Lemme bring that into the shop!” and he repainted it in lovely black acrylic. Years later, I find that cut the value in half! But, it’s a player, not a collectible. I think it’s worth more in parts than as a guitar.
I got the HD28 new in 82 and I really like it. It’s very full, bright and lively when played fingerstyle without fingerpicks, yet still handles hard strumming with a plectrum. Hard to find a guitar with that kind of range, really.
Well, it does have a master volume knob. (Wait!, no, it’s actually got 2!, so umm, I need 2 dual foot switches: volume1/2, reverb on/off, clean/distorted, distorted1/2 ) So, it doesn’t have to be cranked to make a decent sound like my Silvertone (but of course, even that’s not the whole story).
Well, after I bought the amp, I downloaded the schematic, and the signature in the corner is Clive Button, who designed…well, pretty much every circuit that Trace Elliot (among others) ever produced, tube or solid state. The man’s a genius at making electrons do nice things for musicians. I have no doubt he or Robert Gallien* of G-K could design a SS power amp that distorted in a musical way (or they possibly already have done so, I just don’t know about it.) They both have designed wonderful and musical transistor, hybrid and tube amps.
But I think that doing so with an eye for musical distortion with solid state components in the power amp would require more components, generating more heat, causing the need for more non-amplifying parts to cool it, making it more expensive and heavy…I could see it ending up being a boutique-priced SS amp quickly. I don’t think anyone needs that. You can go pick up an old Acoustic rig if you want heavy, expensive and solid state. Come to think of it, they did reissue the 360/361 Acoustic series. They sound awesome, they’re heavy, and they’re pricey as hell. I wonder if they have…yeah, I doubt I would know what it meant if I read it, but I will be looking around for any technical explanation of the 360 power amp.
But, all of that is really a giant diversion while I could figure out what my answer was to your master volume question. Even after writing all of that, and I write slowly, I had to go outside, put some tobacco in my pipe, smoke it, and think before I could write the next paragraph and not say something totally arrogant and stupid.
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The master volume does affect the sound of the amp, but I don’t think it’s due to power amp distortion, even in master volume amps with tube power amps. By the time you get power amp distortion, you’re running the master fairly near wide open. That’s why people used to employ various “power brakes” to record a Marshall half stack wide open in the days of non-master volume amps.
But, I also think that there’s nothing particularly special about power amp distortion. It’s just two more tubes distorting and coloring the sound. The Music Man that I decided to not trade in has the opposite design of this Gallien-Kruger. The MM has a solid state preamp, and a tube power amp. If I run it like you expect a master volume amp to run, it sounds so solid state that there’s no reason for the tubes to be there other than an expensive wearable part. It sounds good, but it’s sharp as hell, not tube-y. If you instead just dime the gain on the preamp channels and use the master volume as the gain on a non-master volume amp, it sounds creamy and smooth.** More nice, different musical distortion can always help an electric guitar signal’s richness once you’ve decided to distort it, IMHO. That’s why a well chosen overdrive can enhance an all-tube amp’s distortion.
On the other hand, you’re pushing the speakers closer to where they sound the best when you start to turn the amp up. Somewhere along the way, there is a point of diminishing returns, but that depends on the cab, not the design of the amp. This is an efficient cab. If I set it to 8 ohms and plugged my (maybe 45 watt) non-master volume Silvertone into it, it would be ungodly loud before 6. It doesn’t really start to break up till 5, and I’m sure the neighbors across the street would be calling the cops by the time I get to 7, where the magic happens. 7-10 through the Silvertone’s original 2x12, ancient cab can keep up with a drum set, but the cops have never been called with it.
TL;DR: All amps are a compromise between a multitude of different choices. No, I am not able to distill that down for you without earning a warning. Go read it yourself.
*The amp that Santana is playing through at Woodstock is Robert Gallien’s first amp he produced commercially, serial number 6.
**I actually was advised this by someone during an after show party at a club one night. Since I was at an after show party at a club, I wasn’t in my right mind, and I eyed him like he was crazy. Everyone at those events usually is, so it’s the most non-offensive stance to take. The next afternoon when I arose, I decided this was far less dangerous advice than the rest of what I had received the night before. So, I tried it out. Whaddaya know, the bastard was right! It sounds an awful lot like my Silvertone when you run it that way!
And now you know…the rest of the story. Two days on, I still love the amp, and I have a cab younger than me that I won’t feel guilty for throwing a kit amp at, unlike the Silvertone cab.
On Preview: Learjeff, never sell! Make your wife and children sleep on a bed of pianos, electric organs and amplifiers first! BWAHAHAAHAHAHAH!
(Rolls away in motorized wheelchair, because that’s ominous)
scabpicker - off into amp rumination land, eh? Sounds like you’re having fun. I don’t know my SS circuits so can comment on that, but regarding power amp tubes, I had written up a great bloody post about how Power Stage tubes matter to the overall tone of the amp when overdriven - my own amp rumination. Bottom line is that power tubes can matter if they are designed to, and all the various ways to lower the loudness while driving signal through the tubes to get their addition to the tone has been a big deal in amp circuit design through the years.
learjeff - now that you mention it, I recall you mentioned condition factors with your JM. By “green guard” I assume you mean the pickguard, which in the earlier examples had an off-white that aged to a mint green. Interesting they don’t line up.
And as for HD-28’s - very cool. Got a few years on it so just getting broken in
) So, it doesn’t have to be cranked to make a decent sound like my Silvertone (but of course, even that’s not the whole story).